April 16, 1912: Icebergs always have been most dangerous sea peril

ICEBERGS ALWAYS HAVE BEEN MOST DANGEROUS SEA PERIL

With Seven-eighths of Bulk Submerged Bergs Cause More Marine Disasters Than Any Other Agency.

From the day the Vikings first pushed their frail crafts across the Atlantic, to the present epoch of such liners as the Titanic, Mauretania and the Olympic, icebergs have been among the most fatal and mysterious perils of the sea. The hardy New England mariner, who has scant fear of gale of breakers, grows anxious when a sudden drop in temperature warns him that his vessel is nearing a mountain of floating ice.

Wrecks without number are due to icebergs. Their human victims are counted by thousands. In collision with their huge bulk the mightiest floating fortress is as fragile as a fishing smack.

Every year the Atlantic coast is bombarded from the frozen north with thousands of bergs, great and small. An iceberg is a fragment of a glacier, which has broken off as the result of the ocean waves melting the ice near the surface, leaving the upper portions unsupported. Most of the icebergs that menace Atlantic commerce have their origin in Greenland, which is covered with a coat of ice, forming a series of glaciers. The arctic snows, frozen by pressure and alternate warm and cold weather, form a solid mass, which is forced, inch by inch, toward the sea. From the borders of these glaciers icebergs are broken off, swept down the coast by Labrador current, and finally melted by the Gulf stream.

This story as it originally appeared in The Denver Post, April 16, 1912.

PEARY NARROWLY ESCAPED FALLING BERG.

From the time the berg, still attached to the parent glacier, projects over the sea until it finally disappears in the warm currents of the southern Atlantic coast it is a source of trouble to the mariner. The most foolhardy ship captain fears to venture near the edge of a glacier, lest a falling berg shatter his ship, or the waves caused by the plunge of a mass of ice into the sea swamp the vessel. Robert E. Peary, in his account of his North pole voyage, tells that his vessel escaped annhilation by a margin of a few inches when an iceberg plunged from a nearby ledge of glacier.

In 1857 an iceberg was sighted off the eastern edge of the Grand Banks, and frozen into the ice were seen two large three-masted sailing vessel. Mariners believed them to be the Erebus and the Terror, the vessels which took Franklin and his party to their death in the Arctic regions. The theory was that the ships had been abandoned, then snowed in, and in time had become imbedded in a glacier, to be broken off years later as part of a huge iceberg. But no shipmaster would venture near enough to examine the vessels closely and the berg floated down the coast and finally broke up, while the ships which might have furnished the key to one of the most tragic riddles of the North were allowed to sink to their grave in the Atlantic.

BERG WHICH WRECKED TITANIC UNUSUAL SHAPE.

One of the greatest elements of danger in icebergs is the fact that the float with only one-eighth of their bulk about the surface. As to the shape of the submerged portion, a ship captain can make no guess. His only means of safety is to give the floating terror as wide a berth as possible. It is within reason to conjecture that the berth which sank the Titanic may have been of unusual shape below the surface and that the ship struck when the pilot thought he was well outside the danger zone.

The largest berg ever seen in Northern waters was sighted off Newfoundland in 1802. It was nine miles long, 200 feet high and 1,000 yards wide. Figuring the submerged portion as seven times this bulk, one may gain a conception of the vast size of some of these masses of ice. The highest berg ever seen was calculated to be 826 feet from water line to summit.

In 1894 a berg was sighted with five dead men near its summit. A cave had been hollowed out of the ice, and a beaten path could be seen. It is supposed that the five unfortunates had been ship-wrecked on the hard iceberg and had perished f cold and hunger.

Maritime history is full of tales of wrecks by icebergs.

In 1856 the Tempest went down with 150 persons on board, after ramming a berg. In 1863 two fine passenger liners, the United Kingdom and the Hibernia, went to the bottom, carrying respectively 180 an 156 persons to death. The Colombo was sunk in 1857 with seventy-four men, and in 1875 the Ismalia went down with fifty-two souls aboard.

One of the three vessels sunk by bergs in 1881 was named the Titania–a name strangely similar to that of the Titanic, in view of the fate of the last named vessel thirty-one years later.

Susanna Speier works in social media and digital journalism. Her writing credits include Scientific American, The Huffington Post, Newsweek/The Daily Beast and Colorado Biz Magazine.

To bring this all into the now, I asked polar researchers about how The Post’s April 16, 1912, cryospheric chronology of history’s most infamous iceberg holds up to modern scientific standards.

The stipulation that the “unusual shape below the surface” might have struck when the pilot thought he was safe “is a reasonable thing to say,” according to Jason Amundson, Assistant Professor of Geophysics at the University of Alaska Southeast.

Brunt cautions, however, that the author’s description of what lay beneath the iceberg’s surface might have been “a little off.”

The language is “a bit dramatic,” says Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado at Boulder-based National Snow and Ice Data Center as he proceeds to take a forensic hacksaw to the premise.

That the “floating terror” postulated in 1912 had an “unusual shape below the surface,” Scambos explains, is a writer “putting an engaging guess in the story, rather than a fact or even a plausible possibility.”

Prying out conjecture

Of the report that “the ship struck when the pilot thought he was well outside the danger zone,” Scambos says “the berg that struck the Titanic did not loom high above the Titanic; avoiding it would have meant a nudge of a few dozen yards at most to one side or the other … if you see an iceberg, you can be almost certain to miss it by going no closer than 10 times its height.”

If the “iceberg is 30 feet tall — the size of a house — above the water, and you are a block away from that house — 300 ft. — you’re safe,” Scambos says. “The captain (or helmsman) of the Titanic did not see the iceberg, and they hit it. If they had seen it, it would have been simple to steer to a safe distance.”

Lincoln Paine, World Maritime Historian and Guest Curator of the Norman H. Morse Ocean Liner Collection at the Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine, agrees that the iceberg could have been spotted in time to avoid a collision, citing a passage from John Maxtone-Graham’s Titanic Tragedy (2011).

“Black mass”

The passage describes what the first officer of the Carpathia, James “Billy” Bisset, who “had the sharpest eyes on board” and was stationed as lookout on the Carpathia’s starboard bridge wing, saw:

“A second incident that Bisset remembered clearly was peering into the night and seeing a pinprick of light directly ahead. Wondering what it was, he decided it warranted a course change. ‘Hard astarboard!’ he bellowed to the helmsman. Carpathia swung to port in a crash turn, skirting past a towering wall of black ice.”

The reported “black ice” was not unique to the Carpathia’s crew’s testimony. Frederick Fleet, the lookout for The Titanic who spotted the iceberg and alerted the rest of the crew, spoke of a black iceberg in his testimony to the United States Senate Inquiry.

Fleet rang the bell and reported the “black mass” that was “as large as two tabletops” and “gradually grew in size” to “about 50 or 60 feet high,” as soon as he realized it was an iceberg. It wasn’t soon enough.

“Ice that is in contact with water tends to be very smooth. Only blue light is reflected. Longer wavelength light travels through the ice” explains Amundson, speculating that the black icebergs the lookouts of both Carpathia and Titanic reported that night were bergs “that recently capsized and exposed ice that was recently below the water.”

Unique among the bergs, blackbergs appear to be very dark and are difficult to see at night, says Amundson.

A "greenberg" iceberg which has recently "flipped" to reveal a surface that was previously underwater.

Green icebergs are also difficult to spot according to Brunt, who has studied them in the Antarctic and explains that their characteristic jade hue is the result of the frozen sea water they pick up during the calving process — when they break away from the glacier.

Brunt has made nine trips to Antarctica and seen green icebergs, however, she has yet to see a blue iceberg, sometimes called a blackberg. Blackbergs are seasonal and more common in the Arctic, where they still are difficult to spot.

Amundsen points out that “most (Arctic) icebergs will have very little seawater in them, especially at the latitude where the Titanic sank — the water there is quite ‘warm.'”

Bisset’s account of how he identified black ice by the “reflection of a single star in its surface,” led John Maxtone-Graham to conclude that, if “Fredrick Fleet and Reginald Lee in Titanic’s crow’s nest shared Bisset’s vigilance, there might well have been no collision.”

Fleet’s testimony also states that he had requested the binoculars he was accustomed to using in crow’s nests but that his request was denied. Further questioning revealed Fleet believed the binoculars would have enabled him to identify the iceberg sooner.

Although the article was written in what was considered the be the “Golden Era” of exploration, Colorado’s polar mojo had yet to be cultivated. The state’s superstar lineup of Arctic and Antarctic specialists, which now boasts logistics providers Lockheed and Polar Field Services/CH2M Hill, also includes NSIDC, CIRES and NCAR serving as global polar research centers.

–Susanna Speier, April 17, 2012

Susanna Speier works in social media and digital journalism. Her writing credits include Scientific American, The Huffington Post, Newsweek/The Daily Beast and Colorado Biz Magazine. Her plays have been produced at HERE Arts Center, The Cocteau, The World Financial Center, The Tenri and Galapagos Arts Space. She has a Masters in Playwriting from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and wrote and produced her first play, Under Titanic, as her undergraduate thesis at Hampshire College. Find her on Twitter: @SusannaSpeier.

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Kristen Iversen is the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. Her forthcoming book, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, will be published in June.

Daniel Allen Butler is the author of nine books and a maritime and military historian. Among his books are "Unsinkable" -- the Full Story of RMS Titanic" and "The Other Side of the Night -- the Carpathia, the Californian, and the Night the Titanic was Lost."

Janet Kalstrom became a docent at the Molly Brown House Museum in Denver after a 37-year banking career. As part of her work as a docent, she dresses in period costume to play Margaret "Molly" Brown at the museum.

As part of the Denver Post's commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on April 15, 1912, we've invited five experts in some aspect of the tragedy to blog for our website. Their fascination with the topic, in many ways, mirrors the enduring fascination of us all with the story of the giant oceanliner that hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic during its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. Over the next month, our bloggers will provide us insights into the ship's history, the cultural context of the times and the passengers, including the indomitable Margaret "Molly" Brown of Denver who was aboard the vessel when it went down. One of our writers will even share her experience of participating in the Titanic Memorial Cruise, which sails in April from Southampton and retraces the route of the Titanic on its fateful voyage.